Editorial: EBooks & Libraries Should Be Friends
HarperCollins’ announcement of curtailments to ebook licences sold to libraries is at best diasappointing news, at worst it marks the beginning of a publisher driven assault on public libraries in the digital age.
With budgets for libraries already under attack across the world, ebooks seem to hold out hope of reducing budgets, while buying more books and helping readers to move smoothely into the digital age.
More then just threatening one bright spot in libraries budgets, this move endangers the growing support for ebooks among librarians who see them as an excellent way to promote literacy, reading and activities and values that bring immense value to book publishers. After all, many book readers buy books and ebooks from bookstores and online as well as reading library books.
Librarians are not seeking to change the fundamental structure of the industry, as Georgina Byrne puts it they are ‘just [trying to] facilitate customers who are at the front of a new way of reading.’
It would be sad if this move by HarperCollins were to be replicated by other publishers in the coming months and years, sad because it shows a distinct lack of interest in the issues, concerns and value of public libraries and sad because it will mark a closing of the ranks of publishers against the rising tide of ereading and demonstrate that they are in truth neither interested in ebooks OR public libraries.
For the sake of libraries, readers and ultimately for publishers themselves, IPN hopes that no publisher will join HarperCollins in this action and that HarperCollins soon see the error of their ways.
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You are entitled to your opinion, Eoin, but this is not a simple “publishers are evil” issue — infinite lending from a single purchase means no revenue from infinite reading, which means one more actual revenue stream to publisherse and authors killed off. HC may have gone too strongly, or set the number too low, but if we want an industry and authors who make actual money (or even a living) from their work (and I do — and I don’t think it’s purely self-interest talking!) then “free forever” is simply not a business model that’s going to work, and honest attempts to negotiate current changes in the book climate have to be treated seriously.
Ivan
Ivan,
I’d be more willing to consider to your view, which I’m not necessarily set against (though I am wary of) if HC had made serious efforts to engage in a debate about ‘the right’ level of circulation before ebooks required re-licensing prior to unilaterally imposing one which is manifestly too low.
As it stands this IS just a money raising plan, which they CAN do, but I think they would be better not to!
Eoin
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